ABSTRACT
Author argues that the temptation to inflate the money supply in the name of full employment policies is an aspect of the British sickness now more likely to be experienced in the United States than in Britain itself. The main public argument now is between those who want to freeze the level of expenditure and those who want to freeze its ratio to the national product. The authors had incidentally a similar bulge in the public-spending ratio in the late 1960s which was also followed by a political reaction. They should be careful in citing figures of the ratio of public spending to the national product, as different definitions produce widely different figures. The so-called British disease is thus a mixture of different maladies, slow growth, a severe recent attack of stagflation, and accompanying political strains. The British inflation rate was only very slightly above the average of the twenty-four nations of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
